Phantom: The Rebound Kickstarted by Mikazuki Production

Sunday, February 14th, 2016

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Mikazuki Production, a small dev team working on their first game, recently started a Kickstarter campaign for their visual novel, Phantom: The Rebound. The game is currently in the early stages with a the game on Steam’s Greenlight service (still waiting to be voted through) and a placeholder image for their GUI. They do state that a demo is in the process of being made, but there’s no indication on whether it will be completed during the Kickstarter campaign or not.

Example of what the GUI display will look like.

The folks at Mikazuki Production seem to have a very detailed narrative drawn up, as they spend most of the campaign talking about the story (with an unfortunate amount of spelling and grammatical errors). The Phantoms referred to in the title are actually test-tube babies that have been infused with alien technology by a shadowy organization. These children develop the ability to possess the minds of others by bending space-time, but the experiments leave the subjects mentally unstable. The organization controls the Phantoms by erasing their memories and manipulating them through mind control in order to combat an alien threat (the same aliens whose tech was used to create the Phantoms). The main character is Takuya, an amnesiac experiment who happens to be the organizations strongest creation. Takuya must avoid the shadowy organization, rogue Phantoms, and aliens while also learning about his mysterious past from the two other main characters, Sakura and Yuki. Believe it or not, this is just a short synopsis of the story; the Kickstarter goes into far more detail, even revealing bits that seem like spoilers for the game. Just be warned when reading through.

The rest of the campaign is surprisingly light on art, considering Phantom: The Rebound is a visual novel. The pictures below are from the Steam page, and some of the artists working on the project (DMiTH and Satya) since there weren’t enough pictures in the Kickstarter to pull from. There are character pics and bios, but even the bios contain spoilers for the story, so they won’t be used here.

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A link to the OST is included in the Kickstarter, but right now only contains three tracks. These quiet and morose piano arrangements are enjoyable if not a little forgettable.

There’s a lot in this campaign to be cautious about, mainly the lack of art and gameplay, but there’s promise with this project. Hopefully Mikazuki Production will release more pictures, information and a demo so people can have a better idea of how Phantom: The Rebound will turn out. For now, and as always, be careful about what campaigns you back and be patient when deciding. No one wants to be disappointed by a rebound, especially on Valentine’s Day.

About Leif Conti-Groome

Leif Conti-Groome is a writer/playwright/video game journalist whose work has appeared on websites such as NextGen Player, Video Game Geek and DriveinTales. His poem Ritual won the 2015 Broadside Contest organized by the Bear Review. While he grew up playing titles such as Final Fantasy VI and Super Double Dragon, he doesn’t really have a preference for genre these days except for Country; that’s a game genre right? Leif’s attention has been more focused on the burgeoning communities of niche Japanese titles, eSports and speedruns. He currently resides in Toronto, Canada and makes a living as a copywriter.